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Adam Burgess
Adam Burgess was a man who sought out the help of the Lone Gunmen to restore his life to him. He had returned to his home in Surf City, Maryland, and crawled into bed with a woman that was not his wife. The woman and her husband were horrified by this stranger in their home but to Adam Burgess, this was his home and he was confused about the whereabouts of his wife. Fleeing what he thought was his home to evade the police, he had spent the night in an alley where he found a cat piss soaked copy of the Lone Gunmen newspaper. Burgess believed aliens had taken him out of a parallel universe and place him in this one where everything was the same except him. Clearly, the publishers of a newspaper with cover stories like "Airport Bathrooms, Is your DNA safe?" would hear him out about being relocated from another reality. John Byers steered Jimmy Bond away from this nutcase but Jimmy pointed out something strange on the back of Adam Burgess's neck: an electrical contact. They brought the man back to their offices and performed an MRI, discovering his brain to be laced with wiring that connected to the data port at the back of the neck. Intrigued, the Lone Gunmen began digging around for information. No records existed for Adam Burgess so they began to believe he wasn't who he thought he was and that the life he experienced had been fed into his mind through the data port. They believed his "home" was put into his head through a series of cameras in the house. When Burgess used a cordless saw to cut open an entire wall to try and find these cameras, he and the Lone Gunmen spent the night in jail. As Richard Langly taunted Burgess one too many times, he snapped, showing the first hints of Burgess's true personality and identity. Joined by Yves Adele Harlow, they had their first big break when Burgess violently attacked Langly after seeing a commercial by Maniac Marvin, an electronics store owner. They went to the store and asked Marvin if he knew Burgess, but the man lied to them. Waiting outside Burgess nonetheless snapped again when a standee of Marvin was placed in the window. Byers and Bond were forced to pull him off Langly and return to the office. Back at the office, Harlow and Frohike explained that Burgess's wife Lois had showed up but that they told her that Adam wasn't around. They wanted to give him the time to sort things out. They suggested to him that the woman was his keeper, not his wife, and that the wiring in his brain is to allow sights, sounds, feelings, and so forth that aren't there to be experienced by him and that she controlled all this. Encouraged to remember who he was, Burgess tackled Frohike seeing him as a Dwarf with goggles. This led the team to realize Burgess had a deep hatred of a man known as the Dwarf Santini which was confirmed by Burgess's smashing of the videotape of Santini. They went to the daughter of Santini, Sadie Muckle, given that the Dwarf Santini had died years earlier. Upon arrival, Burgess went into a rage yet again and charged in with a garden tool. Finding Sadie Muckle and Maniac Marvin in bed together it was only Jimmy Bond's intervention that stopped him from attacking Marvin. Dragging him out into the living room, the whole mess finally becomes clear. Adam Burgess is Charlie Muckle, husband of Sadie. He has been missing for a year. Lois, or rather Dr. de Vico, arrives and aids in clarifying the situation. Adam Burgess explains that he is Charlie Muckle and that he hates himself so he sought to change. As Charlie Muckle he is an alcoholic, has anger issues, shoplifts, steals gasoline, steals social security checks, exposes himself in public to women who think they're hot stuff, and got Sadie's best friend pregnant. So de Vico took him into her program to avoid jailtime over putting out Marvin's eye. This virtual reality program changes his personality by feeding a different easy life to him and new stimuli. It actually submerged his old personality and made him a new changed man. Sadie clearly misses him but Charlie reminds her that she wanted him to change and so he did. Confronted with his old life, Charlie Muckle decides to go back into the tank and become Adam Burgess again, much to the chagrin of Jimmy Bond. Back in the virtual world, Charlie Muckle seems restless and unhappy, even while in bed with his wife "Lois" de Vico. The Lone Gunmen go back to the house and contact Charlie Muckle to try and convince him to go back to the real world and back to Sadie. He can change the old fashioned way, through struggle in the real world, and they manage to change his mind. Charlie Muckle interrupts his ex-wife's wedding and he and Sadie make up to the delight of the four Lone Gunmen, Yves Adele Harlow, and most of Sadie's side of the wedding guests. (The Lone Gunmen: Madam, I'm Adam) Category:TLG characters